Can Best Practice or Medical Director run in the cloud?

Yes — Best Practice, MedicalDirector and most Australian clinical systems can run from a secure cloud environment instead of a server in the practice. For most practices that removes their single biggest IT risk: one ageing box in a storeroom that, if it fails, takes patient records offline for a day or more while parts are sourced.

What does the move actually look like? The clinical system and practice data are migrated to Australian-region cloud infrastructure — Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure — with the same software your team uses today served from an environment that has redundancy built in. Reception logs in the same way. Doctors see the same screens. The difference is what's underneath.

Three things change materially. First, resilience: cloud infrastructure doesn't have a single motherboard to fail, and recovery is a rebuild from tested backups rather than a warranty claim. Second, access: clinicians can reach records securely from home or a second site, behind multi-factor authentication, instead of being tethered to the building. Third, scalability: adding capacity is a configuration change, not a hardware purchase.

This isn't theoretical for Adelaide practices. Adelaide City General Practice — an AGPAL-accredited medical centre in the CBD — ran Medical Director on an on-premise server where one motherboard failure meant at least a full business day without patient records. Otaris migrated the practice to AWS with Microsoft 365, DUO multi-factor authentication and Essential Eight Maturity Level 1 controls. The single point of failure is gone, and doctors gained secure remote access they never had.

The honest caveats: a cloud practice depends on its internet connection, so a proper migration includes a backup link (4G/5G failover) sized for clinical work; and integrations — pathology downloaders, HealthLink, Medical Objects, Medicare claiming — must be migrated and verified as part of the cutover, not discovered missing on Monday morning. This is why the cutover happens outside clinical hours, with the old system kept intact until the new one is proven.

On cost: you're trading periodic server hardware purchases and their maintenance for infrastructure billed as you use it, plus managed support — Otaris plans are published openly at $79 to $199 per user per month. Whether the numbers favour the move depends on your practice's size and the age of what you're running; the free Essential Eight Cyber Security Scorecard doubles as the assessment that answers it. Call 1800 456 567 to talk it through.